March, 05 2019, 11:00pm EDT
For Immediate Release
Contact:
Osprey Orielle Lake - osprey@wecaninternational.org, (415)722-2104
Rebecca Bowe - rbowe@earthjustice.org, (415)217-2093
Indigenous Women's Delegation to Washington, D.C. to Advocate for Tongass Rainforest and Roadless Rule
On March 12 and 13, 2019 a Delegation of Indigenous Women from the Tongass Rainforest in Alaska will be in Washington, D.C. to advocate for the continuation of the Roadless Rule--an important measure to protect Alaska's Tongass National Forest, which falls within the traditional territories of the Tlingit, Haida and Tsimshian Peoples, and is a vital forest ecosystem.
The Delegation will meet with members of Congress, including the Alaska Delegation, committee staff, USDA, and the Forest Service.
WASHINGTON
On March 12 and 13, 2019 a Delegation of Indigenous Women from the Tongass Rainforest in Alaska will be in Washington, D.C. to advocate for the continuation of the Roadless Rule--an important measure to protect Alaska's Tongass National Forest, which falls within the traditional territories of the Tlingit, Haida and Tsimshian Peoples, and is a vital forest ecosystem.
The Delegation will meet with members of Congress, including the Alaska Delegation, committee staff, USDA, and the Forest Service.
At a public event on March 13th from 6:00 to 8:00 at Busboys and Poets on K Street, the women will share their community stories and calls to action to protect their ancient forest homelands (event details: facebook.com/events/1025911427603214).
The Women's Earth and Climate Action Network (WECAN) International, in partnership with Earthjustice, is facilitating this historic Delegation, which is the first time Tlingit women will be traveling to the Capitol to fight to protect their traditional territory, communities and the global climate.
Read full Delegate biographies here:
Watch a video on Indigenous women's efforts to protect the Tongass here: facebook.com/WECAN.Intl/videos/501677453681932
Background: The Tongass Forest of Southeast Alaska is the largest national forest in the United States and the Earth's largest remaining temperate rainforest. A richly bio-diverse area, the many islands of the Alexander Archipelago and Coast Mountains rising from the Alaskan coast are home to bears, wolves, and Sitka black-tailed deer, along with a plethora of bald eagles, ravens and migratory birds.
An abundance of orca and humpback whales, sea lions, seals, sea otters, salmon and porpoises thrive in coastal waters and the fjords cut by glaciers, and the natural wildness of the area drives a healthy local-based economy for Tongass communities and visitors.
Beginning in the 1950's, aggressive, controversial commercial logging clear-cut large areas of the Tongass, negatively impacting the forest and the local Indigenous Peoples who are tightly intertwined with the dynamic ecosystem. Logging in the Tongass destroys sacred sites of the Indigenous Peoples of the region, damages areas of traditional and customary use, and harms watersheds and rivers as well as the global climate.
Even with a destructive history of industrial logging, the Tongass still contains the largest remaining tracts of temperate old-growth rainforest in the world. The Roadless Rule put in place in the early 2000s protects much of the ecosystem, helping make it the U.S.'s single most important national forest for carbon sequestration and climate change mitigation. As parts of Alaska are warming at roughly twice the rate of the rest of the planet, maintaining an intact Tongass ecosystem is critical to providing climate change solutions for Alaska and international climate efforts.
With changing administrations, pressures to lift restrictions and allow exploitation of the commercial value of remaining old growth lumber by timber corporations and commercial interests have gained new momentum. Recent Federal actions are attempting to undermine the Roadless Rule. As a result, the treasured Tongass forest faces one of its greatest and most immediate threats to date.
The WECAN Indigenous Women's Tongass Delegation and allies understand the gravity of the issue and are united in calling for support of the current Roadless Rule and its protections for the Tongass.
Quotes From Delegates:
"We support the current Roadless Rule and its protections for Alaska's Tongass National Forest, Tlingit territory. Prohibiting logging in these areas of the forest protects them for generations to come. The Roadless Rule was a two-decade battle against industrial clear cutting in the Tongass. The 2001 national interest response against clear cutting was the largest on record, thus the Tongass land management plan developed at that time and its strength must not be weakened for corporate interests. Our very presence as the WECAN Indigenous Women's Tongass Delegation in Washington, D. C. is a reminder that the Tongass is inhabited by indigenous wildlife with living cultures infused to the landscape that ties our relationships to the past as well as to the future. The Tongass Forest has not yet recovered from the clear cutting of the 1980-90s. It is the Sealaska ANCSA Corporation that did the most damage to our homeland, and who must be stopped today." - Wanda "Kashudoha" Loescher Culp, Tlingit, activist, artist and WECAN Coordinator in the Tongass
"Creating a state specific Roadless Rule in Alaska will undermine one of the most important ways we Tlingit can protect the Tongass forest, which is our traditional territory. We have lived off these lands in a sacred and caring way for generations, and we want to continue to live in our traditional ways for our children and our children's children. Corporate logging cannot come before we the people. We also know the Tongass is important to help stop climate change for everyone around the world." - Adrien Nichol Lee, Tlingit, President of the Alaska Native Sisterhood Camp 12 and keeper of cultural Tlingit education
"The WECAN Indigenous Women's Tongass Delegation have come to stand together in Washington D.C. We are here in support of the current Roadless Rule to protect the largest national forest in the country, the Alaska Tongass National Forest, which is in Tlingit territory. Our people have been here over 10,000 years, and we are here to protect and preserve the land so we can be here 10,000 years more. Our culture is alive and we want our traditional ways of life that have protected the forest to continue for future generations." - Kari Ames , Tlingit, Alaska Native Voices Cultural Heritage Guide and keeper of traditional life-ways
"I am part of the WECAN delegation to Washington D.C. to represent my daughter and her father's people. He is a Raven Coho of the Tlingit people, or Luxnax.adi. It is important that our daughter grows up in the wild Tongass forest such as my husband did. He is an avid hunter and gatherer just like his ancestors were who have lived on this land since time immemorial. It is important that this land stays wild and free. I am here not only on behalf of my daughter, I am fighting for all the other 70,000 brothers, sisters, grandfathers and grandmothers who live in the Tongass. It is the largest national forest, and I'm going to keep it that way." - Rebekah Sawers, Alaskan Native Yupik and a mother, a daughter and an aunt
"The world's largest remaining temperate rainforest containing vital old-growth trees is under attack because of efforts to undo the Roadless Rule. The Tongass Rainforest of Alaska--the traditional homelands of the Tlingit, Haida and Tsimshian Peoples-- is the largest national forest in the U.S. and has been called 'Americas climate forest' due to its unsurpassed ability to sequester carbon and mitigate climate impacts. For decades, industrial scale logging has been destroying this precious ecosystem, and disrupting the traditional life-ways of the region's Indigenous communities. As attempts are made to strip down remaining protections and open more of this ancient forest to logging, WECAN stands with Indigenous women leaders and their allies to say no to further devastation, and yes to maintaining the current Roadless Rule. Our natural forests are essential lungs of the Earth."- Osprey Orielle Lake, Founder/Executive Director, Women's Earth and Climate Action Network (WECAN) International
"The Roadless Rule is one of our country's greatest land conservation measures. It prevents logging and destructive road-building in our treasured national forests, and bolsters sustainable economic development in tourism, fishing, and other industries. Earthjustice has gone to court in the past to defend the Roadless Rule as a tool for keeping irreplaceable wilderness areas intact, and we will continue to do everything in our power to preserve these culturally significant and uniquely bio-diverse forestlands for future generations. We stand with the indigenous women who will travel from Southeast Alaska to meet with D.C. lawmakers next week to voice their concerns about the fate of the Tongass." - Holly Harris, Staff Attorney in Earthjustice Alaska Office
The Women's Earth and Climate Action Network (WECAN) International is a solutions-based organization established to engage women worldwide in policy advocacy, on-the-ground projects, direct action, trainings, and movement building for global climate justice.
LATEST NEWS
UK Voters Send 'Shout' for Change to Tories as Labour Sweeps in Local Elections
"We are probably looking at certainly one of the worst, if not the worst, Conservative performances in local government elections for the last 40 years," said one analyst.
May 03, 2024
Nearly two weeks after the British Conservative Party pushed through a proposal to deport asylum-seekers to Rwanda in what one lawyer called "performative cruelty" in the name of winning the general election expected later this year, the local election results announced throughout the day Friday made increasingly clear the ploy hadn't worked.
Elections expert John Curtice projected the Tories could ultimately lose up to 500 local council seats as vote counting continues into the weekend, following elections in which voters cast ballots for 2,661 seats.
The Conservatives have lost around half of the seats they are defending Curtice told BBC Radio.
"We are probably looking at certainly one of the worst, if not the worst, Conservative performances in local government elections for the last 40 years," the polling expert said.
Curtice added that if the results were replicated in a general election, Labour would likely win 34% of the vote, with the Tories winning 25%—five years after the right-wing party won in a landslide in the last nationwide contest.
Labour leader Keir Starmer said the results represented a decisive call for "change" from British voters, particularly applauding the results of a special election in Blackpool South, where Labour candidate Chris Webb won nearly 11,000 votes while Conservative David Jones came in a distant second with just over 3,200.
Webb's victory represented a 26% swing in favor of Labour.
"That's the fifth swing of over 20% to the Labour party in by elections in recent months and years. It is a fantastic result, a really first class result," Starmer said. "And here in Blackpool, a message has been sent directly to the prime minister, because this was a parliamentary vote, to say we're fed up with your decline, your chaos... your division and we want change. We want to go forward with Labour."
"That wasn't just a little message," he added. "That wasn't just a murmur. That was a shout from Blackpool. We want to change. And Blackpool speaks for the whole country in saying we've had enough now, after 14 years of failure, 14 years of decline."
The Conservatives also lost ground in the northern town of Hartlepool, where they lost six council seats. The region swung toward the Tories after the party led the push for Brexit, the U.K.'s exit from the European Union.
A similar result was recorded in York and North Yorkshire, which includes the area Conservative Prime Minister Rishi Sunak represented as a member of Parliament.
"Yorkshire voted for Brexit in 2016," wrote William Booth, London bureau chief for The Washington Post. "But long gone are the days when many Conservatives want to stand before the voters and extol the advantages of leaving the European Union, which has been, in most sectors, a flop."
Sunak, added Booth, is "betting that immigration is still an issue with resonance and has promised to 'stop the boats,' the daily spectacle of desperate migrants risking their lives on rubber rafts trying to cross the English Channel. Sunak's government plans to fly asylum seekers arriving by boat to Rwanda. No flights have taken off yet. But the Home Office last week began a self-proclaimed 'large scale' operation to detain asylum seekers destined for removal."
The Labour Party has called Sunak's Rwanda plan a "gimmick" and said it would reverse a Tory policy blocking refugees from applying for asylum.
Average wages in the U.K. last year were "back at the level during the 2008 financial crisis, after taking account of inflation," according toThe Guardian.
"This 15 years of lost wage growth is estimated by the Resolution Foundation thinktank to have cost the average work ÂŁ10,700 ($13,426) a year," reported the newspaper in March. "The performance has been ranked as the worst period for pay growth since the Napoleonic wars ended in 1815."
Analysts noted one setback for Labour in Oldham, where the party lost some seats in areas with large numbers of Muslim voters to independent candidates, costing it overall control of the council.
Arooj Shah, the Labour leader of the Oldham Council, told the BBC that the party's support for Israel in its bombardment of Gaza was behind its losses.
"Gaza is clearly an issue for anyone with an ounce of humanity in them, but we've asked for an immediate cease-fire right from the start," said Shah. "We have a rise of independents because people think mainstream parties aren't the answer."
The losses "should be a wake-up call for the Starmer leadership: Every vote must be earned," said the socialist and anti-racist group Momentum. "That means calling for an immediate arms ban to Israel, calling out Israeli war crimes, and delivering real leadership on climate."
Keep ReadingShow Less
Israel Briefs US on Plan for 'Ethnic Cleansing' of Rafah
"A military invasion in Rafah would be CATASTROPHIC... There can be no more 'evacuations.' There is no safe place to go," said Oxfam, calling for an immediate cease-fire.
May 03, 2024
Israeli officials have told the Biden administration and humanitarian organizations how they plan to start forcibly expelling Gazans from Rafah ahead of a likely ground invasion—a move critics have likened to the ethnic cleansing of Palestine's Arabs during the establishment of the modern state of Israel.
Politicoreported Friday that Israel Defense Forces (IDF) officials informed the U.S. government and aid agencies that a plan is in place to remove Palestinians from Rafah, where approximately 1.2 million refugees forcibly displaced from other parts of Gaza are precariously sheltering alongside around 280,000 local residents in the embattled strip's southernmost city.
According to an unnamed U.S. official and two other people familiar with the plan, Israel would "move people out of Rafah, the main humanitarian hub in the enclave, to al-Mawasi, a small strip of land on the southern Gaza coast." Politico also obtained a copy of a map containing some details of the plan.
The Wall Street Journalreported Friday that Israel has given Hamas until next week to submit to a cease-fire proposal or face an invasion of Rafah.
"Such an invasion could lead to horrific massacres and raise scenarios of a second Nakba," the Gaza-based Palestinian Center for Human Rights said recently. "After 200 days of horrific genocidal acts in Gaza, the real objectives of the attack are the continuation of the 76-year-long ongoing Nakba and the erasure and genocidal destruction of the Palestinian people in Gaza. Israel is laying the groundwork to fulfill its settler-colonial plan of colonizing Gaza."
Human rights defenders have warned that Israel may ultimately seek to ethnically cleanse as many Palestinians as possible from Gaza.
The situation in Rafah is already dire. Water and other necessities are in desperately short supply. According to James Elder, the global spokesperson for the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF), there is approximately one toilet for every 850 people in Rafah and one shower for every 3,500 people.
On Friday, Jens Laerke, a spokesperson for the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, told reporters in Geneva that an Israeli ground invasion of Rafah would put hundreds of thousands of Palestinians "at imminent risk of death."
"Any ground operation would mean more suffering and death," Laerke said, warning of not only "a slaughter of civilians, but also at the same time an incredible blow to the humanitarian operation in the entire strip, because it is run primarily out of Rafah."
Around 5% of Gazans have been killed, maimed, or left missing by Israel's genocidal assault on Gaza, according to a report published Wednesday by the U.N. Development Program and the U.N. Economic Commission for Western Asia. That's more than 120,000 people, the vast majority of whom are innocent civilians, according to Palestinian officials and international human rights groups.
Keep ReadingShow Less
US Rep. Henry Cuellar and Wife Indicted on Bribery Charges
"In exchange for the bribe payments to Imelda Cuellar, Henry Cuellar agreed to perform official acts in his capacity as a member of Congress," the indictment states.
May 03, 2024
The U.S. Department of Justice confirmed Friday that Democratic Texas Congressman Henry Cuellar and his wife, Imelda Cuellar, were indicted last week for allegedly "participating in two schemes involving bribery, unlawful foreign influence, and money laundering."
According to the indictment, between at least December 2014 and November 2021, the Cuellars allegedly took approximately $600,000 in bribes from a fossil fuel company owned by the Azerbaijani government and an unnamed bank headquartered in Mexico City. The congressman, who has served on Capitol Hill for nearly two decades and is seeking reelection, previously co-chaired the Congressional Azerbaijan Caucus.
"The bribe payments were laundered, pursuant to sham consulting contracts, through a series of front companies and middlemen into shell companies owned by Imelda Cuellar," the document states. "In exchange for the bribe payments to Imelda Cuellar, Henry Cuellar agreed to perform official acts in his capacity as a member of Congress, to commit acts in violation of his official duties, and to act as an agent of the government of Azerbaijan and [the foreign bank]."
NBC News first reported early Friday that the Justice Department was expected to release the indictment, which came more than two years after a Federal Bureau of Investigation raid of the couple's Laredo home. Before the document was unsealed, the congressman claimed in a statement that his actions were "consistent with the actions of many of my colleagues and in the interest of the American people."
"I want to be clear that both my wife and I are innocent of these allegations," Cuellar said Friday. "Before I took any action, I proactively sought legal advice from the House Ethics Committee, who gave me more than one written opinion, along with an additional opinion from a national law firm."
The Cuellars "made their initial court appearance today before U.S. Magistrate Judge Dena Palermo in Houston," the Justice Departmnet said Friday. If convicted of all the charges, the 68-year-old congressman and his 67-year-old wife could face decades in prison.
Congressional Democratic leadership last year endorsed Cuellar for reelection in November, despite his opposition to abortion rights—a key issue for this cycle at all levels of politics. During the 2022 cycle, after nearly losing to progressive primary challenger Jessica Cisneros, he beat the Republican nominee, Cassy Garcia, 57% to 43%.
A spokesperson for U.S. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.), Christie Stephenson, saidin a Friday statement that "Henry Cuellar has admirably devoted his career to public service and is a valued member of the House Democratic Caucus. Like any American, Congressman Cuellar is entitled to his day in court and the presumption of innocence throughout the legal process."
"Pursuant to House Democratic Caucus Rule 24, Congressman Cuellar will take leave as ranking member of the Homeland Security Appropriations Subcommittee while this matter is ongoing," Stephenson added.
Cuellar isn't the only Democrat in Congress battling allegations of corruption and bribery charges. Sen. Bob Menendez (D-N.J.) and his wife, Nadine Menendez, were indicted last September and accused of accepting bribes in the form of "cash, gold, payments toward a home mortgage, compensation for a low-or-no-show job, a luxury vehicle, and other things of value."
The following month, the Justice Department accused the senator of acting as an unregistered agent for the government of Egypt. Menendez has denied wrongdoing and refused to resign. Although he is not seeking reelection as a Democrat, he has teased a possible independent run if he is exonerated.
Keep ReadingShow Less
Most Popular